FreeBSD miscellaneous links (nginx, freebsd snapshots, HAST, virtio)

These are a couple of random FreeBSD related links you may find interesting:

How to Install Nginx on FreeBSD 9.x

nginx (pronounced “engine x”) is an open-source web server and a reverse proxy server for HTTP, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, with a strong focus on high concurrency, performance and low memory usage. [Read More – unixmen.com]

New FreeBSD snapshots and virtual machine disk images

New FreeBSD development branch installation ISOs and virtual machine
disk images have been uploaded to the FTP mirrors.

Install HAST on FreeNAS

FreeNAS is awesome, but until recently it lacked HAST (Highly Available STorage). Fortunately now TrueNAS allows for this function to work. HAST is integrated into the FreeBSD base system, in turn HAST can be added into FreeNAS manually.

Speed up FreeBSD KVM guests using Virtio

The virtio framework allows guest operating systems running under the Linux KVM hypervisor to take advantage of near-native I/O performance. It works by providing kernel drivers for the guest OS which only work from within a KVM host, exposing I/O functionality through a much thinner layer of code than the traditional full-on emulation of physical hardware. The less code there is between a virtualized guest OS and the host’s physical hardware, the faster things will go.

Generating custom FreeBSD installation media

Creating and starting VirtualBox machine with PowerShell

BSD Router Project provided a VBScript for starting MS Windows based virtualbox lab. But because this vbs script works only on XP, I had to found a more powerful solution: Why not discovering PowerShell and using the VirtualBox COM API ?